Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu

University of Western Ontario, Canada

vs. myth

Abstract: Myth is neither story nor a twisting of truth; myth is the virus of the other. As such, it viruses culture: it both makes it possible by transforming fear into anxiety, and attempts to overwhelm it, by rationalizing anxiety as mythical fear and elation. Polemics, rather than dialectics, can face the cunning of myth, for polemics flows against the virus of the myth, and a culture that does not fight this virus is not worth the name.

Keywords: myth; language; truth; virus; Franz Kafka; Claude Lévi-Strauss; Hans Blumenberg; Mircea Eliade; Roland Barthes; Roberto Calasso; Ariadne; Prometheus.

a rule of none scorches the earth

to hold it up with cunning flaw

Myth’s entanglements with truth have by and large been superseded by its longer lasting covenant with the narrative. Since the exhaustion of the Enlightenment paradigm has crystallized,[1] the hope that truth – whether factual, analytic, or historical – sets us free from the cunning of myth, has been tamed. The older expressions of truth have been overwhelmed by the other epistemic operative of the reality principle: probability. Probability is truth’s postEnlightenment safeguard against mythical perversions: in postmodernity, truth fashions itself as unmyth. But as truth extricated itself from its murky cohabitation with myth-the-Bogeyman, the liberating function of truth-as-unmyth receded to merely instrumental levels, where one’s being freed from a certain subjection remained one’s only recourse to freedom. One’s probabilistic freedom from is mirrored unmythically into the realm of abstract possibilities, where the freedom to translates essentially as the freedom to abstract oneself. As postmodernity exacerbates the temptation of the real by the possible, truth comes to matter less (and less). This strange thinness of truth, furthered by inconsequential undecidables, abstracts truth from its historical entanglement with myth. By distancing itself from myth, the ideology of truth will force truth into a new mythological cast.

Myth’s covenant with the narrative is of a different nature. Since writing began, and indeterminately long before that, myth has named, has told, and has explained that which matters. [2]

Somehow and everywhere, we are led to believe, myth is a story. It is a story of how something which came to be and how it came into being in illo tempore, that primeval time preceded by the dominion of chaos. Mircea Eliade said it oftentimes,[3] preceded and followed by voices which agree par chœur with such an expeditious definition. In this vein, myth is a story, and the story is invested with powers that crush opposition and difference: myth is a story to assent to. To historians of religions (Otto, Dumézil, Eliade…) the story of origins imprudently turns itself into the origin of the story. But to thinkers who dove into deeper waters (Kafka, Benjamin, Borges…), Karl Kraus’ quip stands like a warning against the origins’ futility: “The origin is the goal.” Any sectarian of the origins is caught in this tautological circularity and pushed into the assent for things as they are (narrated as myth). One lives amongst myths. One seldom escapes.

Yet, how can myth be a story beyond the confines of originism?

Mythical figures live many lives and die many deaths – writes Calasso – and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth. Abandoned in Naxos, Ariadne was shot dead by Artemis’ arrow; Dionysus ordered the killing and stood watching, motionless. Or: Ariadne hung herself in Naxos, after being left by Theseus. Or: pregnant by Theseus and shipwrecked in Cyprus, she died there in childbirth. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, together with his band of followers; they celebrated a divine marriage, after which she rose into the sky, where we still see her today amid the northern constellations. Or: Dionysus came to Ariadne in Naxos, after which she followed him around on his adventures, sharing his bed and fighting with his soldiers; when Dionysus attacked Perseus in the country near Argos, Ariadne went with him, armed to fight amid the ranks of the crazed Bacchants, until Perseus shook the deadly face of Medusa in front of her and Ariadne was turned to stone. And there she stayed, a stone in a field.

No other woman, or goddess, had so many deaths as Ariadne. That stone in Argos, that constellation in the sky, that hanging corpse, that death by childbirth, that girl with an arrow through her breast: Ariadne was all of this.[4]

Ariadne was all of this, but was so as a name fleshed out by a rotating encyclopaedia of stories. These stories are contradictory rather than combinatory; their contradictions enact both the suspension of disbelief and the theatre of storytelling which mimics a writerly mimesis in the same sense in which the Decameron impersonates orality. Whether articulated or not in complex contexts and collections, stories are self-sustaining, in the sense that any story worth the name exists singularly. It is because stories are self-sustaining that myth uses them as its carriers and maids of choice. Myth sandwiches the story between the origin it brings, and the telling fame to which it, and only it, can lead a story, Ariadne’s for instance. Myth can mutate what’s told into muteness, and muteness into spoken tongues. Against this uncanny mutuality of the two sides of speech, stories are the ecstasy of both the spoken and the unspoken.

Myth’s lack of need for translation – for myth, we are told,[5] is the closest language comes to music – is only apparent. For myth is not language.[6]

Ariadne’s name is fleshed out by her stories but, unless her name is the constant allegory of these stories, her name can be mythically disembodied. And what remains after an entity’s disembodiment is different from what preceded its embodiment – this would be the proof of any known entity’s existence. Myth devours the story to sculpt the character’s name out of it. What’s left is a mythical name whose story can’t be further told. Ariadne’s mythical name points back directly to its pre-narrative origin; its thread leads back, out of the labyrinth of richly conflicting stories, into the preverbal. The naming power of myth is as jealous as the absolute, and its cunning covers up it’s the constitution of its object. For what does “the myth of Ariadne” mean? What more than clouding does the ambiguity of the genitive “of” provide? Myth names, not to let itself be named. This naming is nomothetic: myth gives itself as the rule of exception[7], surveying the world from the viewpoint of Distant Law.

The chasm between stories and myth is devastatingly lit in Kafka’s short and dense “Prometheus,”[8] where the first engineer’s fate is told fourfold.

The first is the standard legend: the “gods” punish Prometheus for his having robed them the secret of fire by having him chained on a large rock in the Caucasus mountains, where his liver would be ripped apart – forever daily – by eagles.

In the second the birds torture him so greatly that Prometheus presses himself into the rock “until he became one with it.” What remains, the mass of rock, is the pure matter and Grund which offers unparalleled resistance to knowledge and change.

The third has Prometheus forget – and all the actors (he himself, the gods, the birds) will have forgotten everything, so that, at the end of time, he will be free from being affected. “Nonidentity as autoamnesia is a pure representation of being beyond the reach of persecution,” comments Blumenberg.[9]

Finally, the fourth retelling replaces forgetting with weariness. “The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily,” writes Kafka. [10]

Kafka’s parabolic “tetra-Prometheus” attempts to fly off to an era which is not suffocated by myth (Borges too followed such geological exploits to find that eon where the myth of the past is abandoned for lack of ground).

To understand that myth gives itself at all times, that it is not an ancient, naïve story ready to be bypassed by the proud march of reason, yet somehow resilient to the humanist’s weary and enthusiastic eyes, one needs to go by a more complex concept of history. This would involve a “spiritual” component of history whose eras and eons hardly connect with the periodizations that have made chronology into the blackmailing, one-eyed queen of time. While myth is chronologically set “before” – witness the Aristotle-inspired historiography of the West – its irruption into time can trigger eras and eons. Retrospectively, the chronology of myth appears as nonsense. Kafka attempted to find a parabolic era where myth could find no ground. His storytelling sat myth aside from stories, as did surrealism and absurdism in their resistance to the Enlightenment- and Romanticism-generated totalitarianisms of the twentieth century.

The wholeness of perfect time is an image as cheap as a sectarian bath of mud given to thought. Such utopias nourished by boredom, Carl Gustav Jung’s, for instance, bar thought’s access to time in the name of a vétuste, presqu’eternel esprit. Their Zeitgeist has both spirit and time mirror each other in their unavowable disappearance.

However, with Kafka we have come to understand that stories are told in order to delay what would kill us anyway, and that the escapism vehiculated by myth on the ritual two-way highway to the origins will nothing but make us oblivious to the urgency of this delay.

If it is neither story nor truth blurred, what, then, is myth?

The vastness of the issue calls for a constellation of snapshots – not much more can be delivered in such a limited space.

The answers to the question “what is myth?” follow the c(o)urse of myth’s cunning. A cynic, who has all the answers but no question, would answer, “Myth is what.” It is the “whatness,” the quiddity, the empty yet utopian telos of every mean means for achieving it.

An exhausted thought would see myth as the biggest of an infinite series of fish being swallowed and swallowing in turn – of which the one that sheltered Jonah’s days of tremor, is quite small. Kafka has strictly intimated the anxiety provoked by such a series in calling the hierarchy of justice “infinite” (in The Trial). After Pasteur announced that one can’t photograph the universe because one is already inside it, Russell and Whitehead called the biggest fish, “The set of all sets,” and found it to be empty (in Principia mathematica). Kafka was concerned about and with myth – he was a singular citizen of the jagged border between culture and myth, and he knew that the gods were pushed far away on transcendental ground to let man breathe on earth. That breathlessness was the ground of breath was unknown to Bertrand Russell. Yet, in both cases, the answer to the question “What is myth?” is empty.

In his “must,” Work on Myth, Hans Blumenberg[11] defines myth’s chief function as that of “rationalizing Angst” (dread lacking a specific cause), of transforming it into the fear of named agencies. Myth’s rationality and shielding powers lie, according to him, in its ability to name the threat and tame it within this or that – etiological or not quite so – story. Enlightening as it is, Blumenberg’s theory tells only one half of myth’s story. Myth brings nature to the brink of culture. We must suppose, perhaps, that fear precedes anxiety in the evolution of mankind. Anxiety corresponds to a later stage of development, in which an interiority must be supposed, so that the fear associated with mere instinct is complicated by the invagination of the source of threat. In a first move, myth transforms fear into anxiety – say, the fear of fire into the anxiety elicited by its hardly perfect mastery.[12] If so, myth makes culture possible – as the environment of anxiety. The many faces of monstrosity witness to this moment, as does the idea of a “human nature.” The second moment coincides with Blumenberg’s definition of myth: the transformation of anxiety into fear. What appears to be the reversal of the first moment into the second – of a psychological Unheimlichkeit into a narrative wilderness kept at bay by names and plots – is the central cunning of myth. Myth is primordial to the simple binary in which the Greeks cradled chaos and cosmos. Myth has a forming function: it gives form to chaos, to hyle (stuff), to blunt matter. But myth, uncanny mediator, lies on the threshold between what we call ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ Myth is the civilizing hero of anxiety’s wasteland only because it has already created that wasteland. The second moment, the rationalization of anxiety as fear, can always be carried by stories that attempt to be as “universal” as music. The second moment of myth’s deployment can go by the name of “culture.” Culture is not just play[13]: it is anxiety at play. Thus, to bet against myth requires a two-step move: one step is foolish (to oppose myth does not lie in the powers of man); the other – sublime, thus fairytale-like (there is no higher ground than myth’s on which man can consume his unmanageable contradiction) – or quixotic, though Don Quixote’s tale of no esprit avant la lettre opposes the one of heads-and-tails that Pascal split to bet on God. Behind myth’s taming deeds there lies myth’s mischief. How can one even place the bet against myth, unless one is beyond good and evil, when it’s too late? How can one bet on myth unless one has already abandoned the fight in favour of faith, when is also too late?

Knowledge is split along a divide that often filters and always severs the general-abiding concept from the eventfulness of the singular. To the generality of the concept there correspond particulars, which are mere instances of successful deductions: a tiny green lobster exists as the example of a deduction that goes from the established general to the point of no further division called “tiny green lobster.” As to its “actual existence,” the tiny green lobster had it predicated upon itself within the order of the general and under the orders of General Knowledge. On the other side of the epistemic divide, the tiny green lobster will exist, accidentally and rhizomatically, capriciously and eventfully, thus finding its universality in the flow of its singularity.

Polemics is the fundamental mode of knowledge in action[14]: it entertains the ceaseless fight between the order of the singular and that of the general. Crossing that line is regarded as a desecration, a desertion, or at least as a foolish exercise in impurity. That divide is myth. The Judaeo-Christian forbidden fruit figures not only as the one of knowledge carnal or divine; it also is the barrier that separates the general from the singular quince. Guilty like hell, Adam and Eve ate myth.

The virus of myth makes culture possible and surreptitiously installs itself in language. The medical attempts at healing or purifying language of this virus rank as either foolish (Viennese neopositivists such as Rudolf Carnap give foolishness’ paradigmatic expression in the twentieth century) or sublime (for instance, Mallarmé’s effort to “donne[r] un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”). This pharmacopeia turned ideologocal has done little to prevent myth from carrying across the lands of culture its jealousy, poison, and charm. Unless culture organizes itself to resists myth’s infiltrating attempts, myth will advance in progressively immaterial forms and will chase culture away from all of its sheltering corners. Then, its rule of none will scorch the earth.

Only polemics can face myth, for it gives reality to its opponent, it creates actuality from the middle of the fight, it calls the world to arms. Polemics flows versus the virus of myth, and a culture that does not fight this virus is not worth the name.